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Keywords:

2003 Language Studies, 2004 Linguistics, 4703 Language studies, 4704 Linguistics

Abstract:

In this article we describe the impact of motivational didactic interventions on the process and the output of writing descriptive texts in Spanish as a Foreign Language by Dutch speaking students of the 3rdBachelor year of the Applied Linguistics curriculum at the Flemish KU Leuven university. The texts were stored and analysed in the Aprescrilov learner corpus application. The didactic intervention was tested in a pretest –test –posttest setting, both with consecutive and with simultaneous groups: the results of the year 2006-2007 (without intervention) were compared with the ones of 2007-2008 (with intervention), as well as the results of two groups in 2011-2012 (experimental versus control group). The results of quantitative and qualitative tests show an important impact on both process (motivation, enjoyment and perceived improvement) and output (lexical richness and dynamic style) of the writing of the descriptive texts.